Word: rall
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Based on George Orwell's "1984," Ted Rall's ambitious new graphic novel, "2024" (NBM Publishing; 96 pages; $16.95), imagines the near future as controlled by a corporate totalitarianism rather than a socialist one. Like its precursor, "2024" means to evoke an entire parodistic culture, including social structure, language, art, and philosophy ( "Neo-postmodernism," in Rall's case) by gently exaggerating the current culture of its core audience...
...Rall's Winston Smith lives in Canamexicusa, which exists in perpetual trade-war with either the "Euros" or the Asians. Meanwhile Smith spends his days in an "upper-middle management" job and either trading shares, buying consumable goods over the ubiquitous web-tv, or watching porn. Mirroring the events of "1984," the "2024" Winston takes an interest in illegal, bootlegged, old-school videogames like "Pong," and has an affair with a woman who's upper-upper management. Eventually he gets caught and subjected to "Channel 101," an educational program about rats, which so severely strains Smith's entertainment requirements that...
...Rall, a political cartoonist who occasionally contributes to the print arm of this Website, has a clunky, chunky drawing style which gains in uniqueness what it loses in verisimilitude. Almost cubist, the flat, black and white images include characters that always stand with their body facing you but their face in profile, except for the eyes, which sit on one side together. Mostly the images are in service to the text, which tends to bear down on them, overwhelming them. Rall likes words...
...paralleling the magnum opus of George Orwell, one of the 20th century's masters of clear, precise English prose, Rall sets himself up for a fall. Unlike Orwell, he lacks the clarity of ideas and language to make a convincing, or even understandable gestalt. The confusion of "2024" permeates everything from overall themes to simple panel-to-panel tone inconsistencies. For example one panel reads, "These extremists threatened everything ... they had to be killed," followed immediately by "Fortunately, nobody took them seriously..." Believe me, the pictures don't makes this any more understandable...
December 2, 1974: Derrick A. Rall Jr., the only black professor at Harvard Law School, threatens to resign if HLS does not substantially increase efforts to hire minority faculty...